In the true spirit of open data, data journalism and open journalism, Ryan published his workings. Also, as Noah’s scraper is on ScraperWiki, so the code and the data is available for anyone to use, reuse and recycle (we’re very good for the data environment!).

Because we’re an open platform we’re free for experimentation. And what’s most interesting about our community of coders is the many varied ways they look at and liberate data. Noah and Ryan used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and integrated the JSON file into the scraper. In that way, you can clean large amounts of scraped data quickly and build an interactive for The Texas Tribune Data in record time.

In the 24hr digital news cycle, stories built with the digital platform in mind were difficult to pitch because the time frame was too wide compared to the traditional article. Noah and Ryan have shown that gap is narrowing. With the vast array of tools being developed to handle data quickly and efficiently, ‘stories’ like this are going to become the norm in the digital news cycle.